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PRINCETON: SPOTLIGHT: U.S. 1 Poets to release their new journal

April, the most poetic month

By Linda Arntzenius Special Writer
    April is National Poetry Month, but lovers of the art don’t have to wait until spring to enjoy the form. “If you throw a stone in Princeton, you are likely to hit a poet,” comments Winnie Hughes, a 15-year member of U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, which launches Volume 54 of its journal, U.S. 1 Worksheets, this Sunday at the Princeton Public Library.
    “I’ve been amazed by the consistent numbers who come to the U.S. 1 Poets Invite series at the library,” says Ms. Hughes. The monthly series is just one of an array of readings, workshops, and critique sessions offered locally. By all accounts people are eager to read, listen, and learn — and not just in Princeton.
    PoetryNJ, the listserv of readings, workshops and literary events in the tristate area, has more than 1,100 subscribers. Peter Murphy, who maintains it, notes that in addition to graduates enrolling in MFA programs, greater numbers of mature people are turning out for workshops, conferences, and retreats, while young people are flocking to open mics.
    As director of the annual Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway in Cape May, Mr. Murphy has seen numbers rise to an average of some 200 participants during the past few years. The writers’ retreat which the Welsh- born New Yorker will run this August in Wales sold out in just three weeks. “These are astonishing numbers,” says Mr. Murphy, a part-time teacher at Richard Stockton College.
    Peter Krok, editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal and director of the Manayunk Art Center in northwest Philadelphia, has also found that the poetry community has expanded and, along with it, an appreciation of poetry as more than greeting card sentiment. Mr. Krok’s book, “Looking For An Eye,” was recently published by Foothills Press.
    So what prompts this burgeoning interest? Is it the need for community among closet poets who’ve always been there? Is it because the form nicely serves shortening attention spans? Is it the comfort of being read to, networking by authors in pursuit of publication, or all of the above?
    “Poetry offers an alternative to sound bites,” suggests Mr. Murphy. “It satisfies a craving for more complex responses than we have been receiving from the popular, commercial and political culture.”
    Author of “Stubborn Child” and “Thorough & Efficient” (both from Jane Street Press) and a wordsmith for more than 40 years, Mr. Murphy writes in hotel rooms. Last year he composed in hotels in Atlantic City, Bridgewater, Cape May, Edison, Mount Laurel, Philadelphia, New York and London. “I belong to more hotel rewards clubs than anyone I know,” he laughs.
    “Poetry is a means of communicating with the self and the other,” says Mr. Krok, a Philadephia native often referred to as “the red brick poet.”
    Poetry’s self-revelatory aspect fascinated the late John Falk, to whom this year’s U.S. 1 Worksheets is dedicated. Interviewed shortly before he died last week, Mr. Falk, who was a longtime Princeton resident, commented: “Poetry is a kind of passionate and slightly wild mathematics, which has always helped me realize just what I was thinking and feeling, often to my surprise.”
    Ms. Hughes believes that poetry fills a deep need within all of us. “Poetry at its best is a necessity of life. In my own experience, I have been very much moved by the response to a poem of mine entitled ‘Dyslexia.’ People have come up to me after readings and have written to me about it on blogs in very emotional terms. I have sometimes given it to parents of special-ed children, who were not particularly interested in poetry at all; one mother burst into tears right in front of me.”
    Ms. Hughes’ work appears in the latest issue of U.S. 1 Worksheets as well as in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. For the last two years, she has been writing a novel based on the relationship between the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and his mistress, Ellen Lawless Ternan.
    Whatever the reason, the increased attention to poetry and poets has a downside, according to Mr. Murphy. “Too many people think they can write poetry without training or hard work,” he says. “They write poems, therefore they are poets. Yet they wouldn’t dream of saying they are painters, dancers or musicians without years of practice and lessons.”
    This is where those workshops come in.
    Enriqueta Carrington, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a frequent host of U.S. 1 weekly sessions, suggests successful workshops offer “poetic sympathy” and a degree of fair play.
    “Reciprocity is key since it is irritating when somebody tries to hog the whole show,” she says.
    For novice poets, workshops can supply lessons in restraint — to suggest meaning rather than rub the reader’s nose in it. “An explained poem is as dead as an explained joke,” says Ms. Carrington, who has a penchant for formal poetry she describes as “shapely and not at all fashionable.” Besides U.S. 1 Worksheets, Ms. Carrington sends her work to form-friendly journals such as Contemporary Sonnet, Umbrella, and Bumbershoot.
    “Workshops allow writers to learn their craft,” says Mr. Murphy. “It they are lucky, they will begin to read the canon and, in a sense, apprentice themselves to those masters who have come before.”
    Ms. Hughes was first encouraged to submit her poems to literary journals while attending Jean Hollander’s long-running workshop at the Princeton YWCA. Ms. Hollander has nurtured dozens of local writers.
    “Critique sessions are valuable for getting writers out of their lonely garrets and mind-sets; they provide a sense of how actual people respond to a piece of writing, which can be life-altering, or at least poem-altering,” says Ms. Hughes. “Novice poets can learn the tricks of the trade — those little technical aspects that make a poem seem less amateurish and more professional.”
• Poets included in U.S. 1 Worksheets, Volume 54, will read their work at a launch party for the journal this Sunday at the Princeton Public Library from 2 to 4 p.m. The journal features work by seasoned writers James Richardson, Richard Jones, Terry Blackhawk, Adele Kenny and Liz Socolow, as well as the Los Angeles poet James Ragan.
• Nancy Scott, managing editor of U.S. 1 Worksheets, will read from her collection “One Stands Guard, One Sleeps” at the Princeton Public Library on April 15 at 7:30 p.m.
• Copies of U.S. 1 Worksheets, Volume 54, are available at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton.